There’s so much wrong with this entire thing that I’m not entirely certain where to begin. But, to ensure that we’re all on the same page [by now, you should be on either the indexpage, or the one devoted to this article], here’s the news...inasmuch as the Village Voice is news.

As of now, the story’s here.  As of later, potentially, it’s also here, granting that things on the ’net don’t always stay where they’re initially put [I think there are still a few dead intralinks on this site which never got updated for the new blogueware].

So. There it is. And it’s really all summed up in a single paragraph: But the point isn’t to smack one more label on mainstream video games (violent, sexist, racist). The point is that—for this white girl, at least—the Resident Evil 5 trailer is strangely disturbing.

Isn’t Critical Review neat? Not that the Voice would have lawyers anyway; lawyers are, like, part of the Establishment, after all.

So. Where in fact to begin. We could start in the seventies, I suppose. Remember SpaceInvaders? That ultraviolent pixelcidal alien exploitation game? Me neither. Though I suppose that would count as a racist murdersim, the boringish 8bit war occurring betwixt the human race and...whatever those prehistoric mudkip sprites were. I dunno.

But that’s probably reading too much into a harmless thing. So we won’t do that here. Maybe the Voice can get to it on their own time

This really isn’t a NotS about the Voice. It’s not even a NotS about the XBox. Call me optimistic, but I figure there’s no need to belabour the point of obvious idiocy.

Instead, this is a NotS about a black dude shooting white cops in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

Just kidding. The real problem with San Andreas was polygonal wireframes accidentally left in the forgotten sourcecode beneath the game which could only be accessed by violating the EULA and cracking the—oh wait...no...that wasn’t a problem; sorry: for a second there, I forgot that Hillary Ashcroft Clinton is not to be trusted.

Still looking for a place to start on this idiocy....

So, I wrote this book once. What the hell: it’s not like anything thus far in the article is related to anything else. But this might actually matter. I wrote this book about zombies. And, being not personally bigoted against any congenital condition [I don’t count idiocy in the biologically capable as a congenital thing; it’s a learned laziness], I had white zombies, black zombies...I had a zombified Cryolophosaurus ellioti in there; I’m bloody well diverse.

But, this isn’t about allosaurs. Or sinraptors. Possible tetanurans. Theropods, anyway. We think. Y’know: palaeontology is an exact science; but so is medicine; still: everybody lies. Dig?

Where in hell was I...apart from halfway into a headache. Oh yeah: black zombies.

In Paroxysm, one of the characters decided to call the black zombies ziggers. The Grey Man. I liked that. I always like it when characters in my novels think up neat shit. Then I tend to kill them anyway, since I work in mysterious ways. Also because there are no happy endings in reality; there are just circumstances in which people evade death long enough to carry their own oxygen around with them while whimpering about the good old days. This isn’t about that either.

Really, this isn’t even about zombies. It hasn’t been since...pretty much ever. Instead of writing for the Voice, I went to the streets. Specifically of Racoon City. I’ve been playing these admittedly silly games for ten years now. Even in the first, inasmuch as it contained zombies, the main villain, apart from SpoilerWeskerSpoiler, was the Tyrant. For those of you catching up having only seen a couple of loosely related films, the Nemesis was a sort of modified Tyrant designed to hunt the games’ protagonists exclusively. But that’s its own thing.

One thing is true, and it’s something I’d noticed in the games and considered while writing the novel: all the zombies in the games were white. Or, really, grey. The Grey Man. Keeping down the whites, blacks, and whatever else. But, as mentioned in the Voice [kinda], that sorta follows: Racoon City was a smallish American city, probably somewhere in Ohio; there has never been a percentage higher than about thirteen for black Americans—even back when every white guy in the country reportedly owned a dozen each. But this isn’t about that either.

I’ve been to Racoon City. Not just in the games, but IRL. Functionally. It’s just DuhMoines. Or Marietta. Or any other town separated by a wall of misunderstanding from Harlem and containing less than a million people. The sad fact is that the only place in this country where you’re guaranteed to see black guys and oriental chicks and Martians and whatever else in the same place at the same time is in advertising. And I’m not sure which is worse about that: that it never happens in reality, or that Madison Avenue wants us to makebelieve that it does.

And here we find ourselves in a dangerous place, because people are morons. So I’ll make this as simple as my wordprocessor will allow. I don’t care. I don’t like blacks; I don’t dislike blacks; I don’t care. I don’t think about them, to be honest. I think about people; I don’t think about genetic suntans. For all I care, you could be plaid; and, while I’m not personally a huge fan of the Scottish, it won’t bug me. Just, don’t be an idiot; we’ll get on just fine.

So. Back to the black nadazombies in Africa. Which itself leads to another few points of contention.

First: they’re not zombies. Technically. By certain estimations. Mine not among them. I personally regard the Infected in 28 Days Later to be zombies, because they’re mindless, anthropophagous sociopaths running [yes, running] about, biting, infecting, and/or eating everyone else. Also from Paroxysm, and reiterated here because the novel was an idiotunfriendly 250,000 words and this might not be: I consider zombies to be, functionally, a group [class, race, whatever] of people whose intent is to infect you and make you one of them. Whether that’s Romero’s Ghouls, Boyle’s Infected, Stoker’s Vampires, Matheson’s Zompires, O’Bannon’s SpaceGirl, or the Voice’s Journalists. In that sense, the general oppositional force in Res5 are probably zombiesque enough as to make no difference. Unless you really want something to whimper about, in which case it could be argued that the physiological zombies in the first three primary games were mostly white, while the blacks in Res5 and the Spaniards in Res4 were some secondary, less meaningful sort of infected peopleeaters. But I’m not going to argue that, because I don’t care.

Second: it’s Africa. You really want to deny a few basic facts? Pretend that Africa, when plagued by any given event, isn’t somehow going to involve black people. It’s Africa. It’s where black people live. I know how much that sounds like a bushism, but it’s pretty much the actual case. Homosapiens came out of Africa as black people, evolving lighter skintones in Scandinavia where white people were and are more fit to survive. And, if that sounds a little too heartless and intelligent to you, go the other way and blame Quetzalcoatl for making it so; I just work here.

Third: I’d like to be impressed by someone noting the...hang on; I’ll find and copypaste the actual, illiterate sentence....

Sounds familiar yet? Yup, we could be talking about the HIV/AIDS crisis, which has killed 15 million Africans, and infected 25 million others on the continent. Especially since one of the few sentences spoken in the Resident Evil 5 trailer is, “Casualties continue to mount over the long years I have struggled.”

Ooh. It’s 2007, and someone put that together. Good job, Moron.

Of course, John Carpenter already did that for you, some years ago. He noted, in the commentary on the disc, that 1982’s The Thing was, even at the time, analogous to the emerging AIDS pandemic. Romero mentioned the same thing—regarding I think Day of the Dead from 1985. You’re late to the party, Kid. Also, if you’re still looking for something to be terribly clever about, it’s too late to note that Attack of the Killer Tomatoes was all about frankenfoods; they mentioned that on its disc, as well.

Yes, HIV is just like a zombiebug. Because, as we all know, anyone with AIDS is suddenly inclined to run around biting people. Happens all the time. Totally. And, if you get bit by someone with AIDS, you die, then get up and kill; the people you kill get up and kill; the people they kill get up and kill; and the people they kill get up and become journalists. Grow up.

Fourth: it’s a videogame. Says so right there on the box. Or, it will, if it ever gets finished. It doesn’t matter. And I say that as someone who plays videogames more hours per day than I sleep. Know what I did yesterday? I played Rise of Nations five times. About four hours per game. Won’em all; but guess what that leaves time for, outside the game: very little. It occurred to me, around four in the morning, that I hadn’t even stood up for twelve hours. Even to go take a leak. On the bright side, it secondarily occurred to me that, at least, I hadn’t just taken a leak without standing up first. So that all worked out well enough, except that I got approximately zilch accomplished yesterday. The genocide of the French is fun, of course; but it’s a meaningless game, so it’s not actually an accomplishment.

It’s a videogame. It’s not Jack Thompson’s Murder Simulator. It’s not Hillary Ashcroft Clinton’s Sextoy. It’s not training anyone to go to Africa, wait for HIV to evolve to the extent that it causes its victims to die, rise, bite, and spread the new condition. Grand Theft Auto doesn’t make you kill cops; Resident Evil doesn’t make you a zombie; Prance Prance Revolution doesn’t make you gay. As far as I know. But I’ve never played it. Danced it. Whatever those little fruits at the mall are doing. Maybe it makes you epileptic; I dunno.

Hey: there you go. I’ve seen white people flailing about on Prance Prance Revolution. What manner of racism is that: pretending that white guys can dance. There oughtta be a law.

It’s a videogame. No one cares. Or, no one should care. Silly sapiens.

Of course, that’s just my opinion; I think I developed it while playing Destroy All Humans.

I know: I took some time off from this sort of thing; I hear about that a lot. Two reasons.

First: I’ve got other stuff going on; NotS has never really been the fulltime job it probably should be. That said....

Second: it’s a bit hopeless, in fact. It’s not that I never encounter anything dumb enough to report and, more importantly, opine upon; it’s that, given the world as it’s rapidly becoming, I have serious doubts that I could finish typing a single article before  three more painfully retarded stories hit the mainstream news. NotS is not, I suppose, mainstream, since there’s not a lot here about puppies being cute and nuns being somehow useful to the planet.

All that out of the way, I just ran across this, from TimesOnline.co.uk, about merit badges for Guides. If you happen to be in the US while reading this, and are therefore not entirely aware that there are other countries out there, the Guides are sorta like GirlScouts, or Brownies, or Nick Cave Groupies. You get the idea.

Granting that I’m not a huge fan of merit badges in the first place, inasmuch as I regard it as a useless waste of materials to print up a reminder that you didn’t fuck up tragically [inasmuch also as it takes a lot to get me to regard anything as a waste of material on a planet where oxygen remains a fairly recent form of air pollution], you’ll never guess what they’re handing out merit badges for. Unless you’ve already noticed the image to the right of the following paragraphs.

That’s right, Kids: a merit badge for safe sex. Oh goody.

Let’s talk about that for a moment, before we get into the idiocy inherent in handing out little patches over it.

Once upon a time, there were these certain sorts of diseases which, if you were really lucky, you could get by sticking your dick into someone. Which is to say that there were other ways to get them; but those ways were globally regarded as being less fun overall.

For the most part, the diseases were pretty boring, by modern standards. You could kill them by taking a few pills derived from mould [this being not a NotS about antibacterial agents, I won’t expound on the attrition of any doctor talking to me like I never went to college but did suffer a bad case of brainloss recently and therefore couldn’t guess that failing to take all the penicillin prescribed might somehow result in a Bad Thing]; there were a viral affliction or two, which even now lack actual cures, but that was little more than a sad fact of life on a planet routinely hit by rogue asteroids—you could live with them.

Then, in the eighties, a new superbug began appearing in the news. The mainstream news. Those invenerable fucktards rushing to alert You to the dangers of touching a doorknob anywhere west of Venus. And that led to this big thing about Safe Sex  and Bad Heroin and whatever else. Because, really, we had to hear about a damned immunicidal virus to form a disparaging opinion about smack.

A fun fact I learned, comparatively recently. Now, today, in the twenty-first century, about one in a thousand people, on average, are wandering around with AIDS. One per thousand. That angers me: I coulda played Russian Roulette another seven hundred times or so, given those odds.

Okay: of chicks who’d sleep with me, call it another fifty times. If I suddenly got all fastidious. Look: this isn’t about that. Let’s move on....

So, here’s the thing. We—and I use that pronoun loosely—are now handing out little starstickers to kids who regard the eighties with the same squinty disbelief as the generation leading up to them have always thought of the sixties. Except that, where we wonder what strange, alien civilisation actually made a big, lifestopping deal about watching people trying to get into orbit without blowing up on all three channels at once, The Kids Today are marvelling, in general, at the archaic practise of randomly fucking every third biped on the street without thinking that, just maybe, you were meeting Typhoid Mary. Okay? In essence, We’re handing out merit badges for remembering not to get halfway to orbit before exploding.

It’s like the adverts for Coca-cola and Jeezuz. Do we really need to be reminded anymore? Are natives of Antarctica wandering into civilisation, having not heard that brown, fizzy sugarwater is yummy, that a terrorist was executed for 613 forgotten sins, and that throwing your dick into someone with more tracks than a shippingyard might be, like, a Bad Idea? Really? Someone deleted that EMail without comprehending the content? We need Patricia Quinn’s lips smacked onto the original pocketprotector to belabour this point?

Okay. That this website exists at all suggests that, probably, we need this sort of thing. And that’s what’s got me a bit nonplussed while three new reports of The Latest Antics of Homo plebeians are ReallySympleSyndicating their ways into Firefox an AltTab away.

But not this time, damnit. This time, I’m getting all proactive. Probably. While admitting that I’m not entirely certain what exactly the definition of proaction is; I think it might have something to do with whimpering more than voting; I dunno.

So. Here we go. My Proposed List of Merit Badges for 2008: 

• Selfawareness above and beyond Expectation while Not Managing to Behead Oneself
• Cognitive Prowess in Memorising Which Way the Switch Goes to Make the Lights Happen
• Excellence in Grokking the Notsmart Ungood of Hairdryers in the Bathtub
• The Pyooleetsir™ for Banging out a Selfdeprecating Article Regarding Dumb Things [I’m framing mine]
• Official Authority on Not Eating Live Worms

• It's been brought to my attention that GirlScouts should be able to bypass the aiming stage. Too bad: my meritbadge; my rules.

  Mesmerising Ability to Unzip, Aim, and Piss in the Correct Order
• Did Notice That TransFormers Was a Painfully Stupid Film

Apart from TransFormers probably being trademarked somewhere, I’ll look into shirts and bumperstickers with these accolades later, if I happen to care that much. If so, I’ll probably get a medal for it, too.

Of course, that’s just my opinion; and I’m wearing it on my sleeve.